


This Moment Is Ours to Own

by DaintyDuck_99



Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV 2020)
Genre: Bisexual Julie Molina, Bisexual Reggie Peters (Julie and The Phantoms), Edge of Great Belongs to Rukebox Now, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Humor, Friends to Lovers, Friendship/Love, Gentle Kissing, Getting Together, Good Friend Alex Mercer (Julie and The Phantoms), M/M, Multi, OT3, Pansexual Luke Patterson (Julie and The Phantoms), Polyamory, Soul Magic, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-10
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-16 13:20:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29950581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaintyDuck_99/pseuds/DaintyDuck_99
Summary: Luke does the only thing he can think to do—he tilts his head, but not in his direction. He nods at Julie, begging for Reggie to understand.Reggie claims Luke’s verse without missing a beat, pouring so much conviction into the words 'we all make mistakes' that Luke almost fumbles and does exactly that with the one instrument he still has in his repertoire.Or: Luke loses his voice at the worst time, but Reggie covers for him. Seeing him and Julie sing together makes Luke realize that maybe it IS obvious—he likes them both. This is set sometime after season one.Bonus Chapter: The Missing Rulie Scene
Relationships: Alex Mercer & Julie Molina & Luke Patterson & Reggie Peters, Julie Molina/Luke Patterson, Julie Molina/Luke Patterson/Reggie Peters, Julie Molina/Reggie Peters, Luke Patterson/Reggie Peters (Julie and The Phantoms)
Comments: 23
Kudos: 137





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to the lovely [goodluckgettingtosleep](https://archiveofourown.org/users/goodluckgettingtosleep/pseuds/goodluckgettingtosleep/works?fandom_id=54287196) for taking the time to beta this!

Luke’s experienced these symptoms before: a dry cough, scorched throat, and a persistent throbbing behind his Adam's apple that almost hurts worse than the shock of Caleb’s brand had. 

In short, Luke is no stranger to shredding chords, least of all the ones that let him sing. 

He’s just never lost his voice at exactly the wrong moment—until now. 

They’ve managed to stay visible for the entire set by blending a bunch of their songs, which had seemed like such a good idea. It’s their first multi-song performance, and he can’t blow it on the final song, _fuck_. The irony isn’t lost on him as Julie sings about getting a second act. 

Another cough escapes from his lips, but thankfully, he’s maneuvered himself away from the mike enough that it doesn’t pick up. Reggie locks eyes with him, keen as ever when it comes to erratic behavior from his friends. Luke prays that no one else has noticed. 

Luke does the only thing he can think to do—he tilts his head, but not in his direction. He nods at Julie, begging for Reggie to understand with a wild panic that must bleed into his gaze. 

Reggie claims Luke’s verse without missing a beat, pouring so much conviction into the words _we all make mistakes_ that Luke almost fumbles and does exactly that with the one instrument he still has in his repertoire. 

Julie turns to face Reggie as if they’d planned it, twirling away from Alex. 

They’ve been singing together a little more ever since the band first performed “Stand Tall,” but it’s never been quite like this, thrumming with the fluidity of water and sheer power of air, a hurricane of harmonies and passion that’s impossible to ignore. 

Luke tries not to get sucked in and devotes himself to playing to Alex, who smiles reassuringly as much as he can around his own singing parts. 

He nearly falters at the guitar riff, wondering if he should just poof out with Alex, when he’s swept into the eye of the storm. Julie and Reggie are suddenly all around him, and they each place a hand on his arm, spinning him around to face the front. Luke keeps playing.

Then they’re both looking at Luke, singing to him, and he is so lucky that muscle memory exists, because his brain short circuits. 

_Running from the past_

Crumpled papers littering Luke’s bedroom, a graveyard of poetry. He’s buried odes to green eyes and a breezy, hopeful spirit that brightens every room like a wind chime. The least endearing song lives on the page, a more frustration-fueled description of crooked teeth.

Luke wonders if the old words still mark his comforter as they flare back to life in his chest.

_Tripping on the now_

An angelic voice crashing over him like a wave, time and time again. Whenever he turns around, Luke’s being swept off of his feet by a girl whose dark eyes are always spilling with new depths. She saturates his lyrics, too, mingling them with her own like it’s easy.

The three of them—could it really be this easy? 

_What_ _is_ _lost can be found_

He isn’t sure if they’re referring to him, his voice, or the original context of the song, anymore. Hell, maybe he’s been in a coma for twenty-five years, and his sick brain is hallucinating this incredibly romantic scenario in which he’s being serenaded by two beautiful people. 

_It’s obvious..._

Julie and Reggie share a tender smile as they release the final phrase, and everything rings in Luke’s ears, something to cherish as he tries to make sense of it, the roaring of the ocean and the whispers of the wind in a conch shell. 

They wrap him a half-hug, one of them over each shoulder, careful not to jostle Luke’s guitar or Reggie’s bass. The trifecta of their heartbeats strikes a thunder that nearly drowns his aches. 

Julie has to let go before Reggie and Luke disappear, but Reggie doesn’t poof away or remove his arm from around Luke.

“Will you be okay?” he murmurs, and his breath is warm where it curls against Luke’s jaw.

Some things still aren’t so obvious—how can they have heartbeats, what are the implications of Luke being able to lose his voice, why do they even need to breathe—but he knows that he will be okay.

For one thing, Reggie smells the way he always has, clean and minty with traces of honey, and it’s never failed to remind Luke that he can start over if he screws up.

With that in mind, he totally means to nod as Reggie starts to pull back, but Luke gets a little ahead of himself and surges forward, instead. 

Caught off-guard, Reggie gasps, and their teeth and the strings of their guitars clash. 

Luke poofs away before he can reappear and hopes that Reggie does the same, heart pounding in double-time. He gropes for a place where he can be alone for a while and lands in the arcade. 

Unlike most of the boys’ former haunts, this one hasn’t changed much, save for a handful of newer games that have been crammed in. There’s a TV with a dance floor, which is at least new to Luke, and it looks like a game that Alex would love. 

He pauses behind a couple of kids playing _Street Fighter_. The boy on the left gripes as he mashes the buttons, swiftly losing to the girl on the right as she hammers out lethal combos. He pouts, and she gloats for a moment, but quickly softens and soothes him with the promise of pizza. 

It’s so familiar that Luke’s chest hurts, all of the times he dried Reggie’s tears after getting a little too competitive over a game, even though Reggie just liked pressing all of the buttons and spending time with him. 

All four of them would split a pizza, then, and swipe slices from each other’s plates, laughing and smearing grease everywhere. 

It was the first time he’d ever glimpsed Reggie’s full smile, the blinding joy that unfurls when he reveals his imperfect teeth. 

That smile should’ve been marred by the trappings of cheap pizza, at least, but it wasn’t, and Luke knew then that he was attracted to beautiful souls, even if there wasn’t a word for it, yet.

Well—maybe he also has a thing for people who simply own their ‘imperfections’. Julie has that cute little tooth gap, too, after all. 

God, Luke hopes that Alex never makes that connection. He’d tease him about it mercilessly for the rest of their afterlives. 

Taking one last look around the arcade, he resolves to bring the others back and introduce Julie to it, sometime. Maybe they can make some new memories here. 

_This moment is ours to own._

Luke’s greeted by quite the sight when he poofs into the garage.

Alex is doing his anxiety strut, but his head is covered in mini-braids, some of which have flowers woven through them. 

Reggie’s hands are full of Julie’s hair, which is about halfway braided, and she’s frantically typing from her seat on the floor in front of the couch, eyes glued to her computer. 

“Dude, where have you been?” Alex asks, pausing mid-strut. 

Julie and Reggie’s gazes both snap to him, eyes wide with concern. It’s always hard to tell if Julie is blushing, but Reggie doesn’t have that luxury, and he ducks to bury his pink cheeks in the unbraided half of her hair, just barely peeking over her head, hands frozen.

Luke holds out his hands. Julie is the first to catch on, scrabbling under the couch without looking, hands behind her, until she retrieves his notebook, which she tosses to him. Alex crosses the room to bring him a pen.

Talking like this takes forever, but at least he’s with the people who’ve bothered to learn how to translate his terrible handwriting. 

Once he explains why he left and where he went, he goes over to Julie and Reggie, holding the notebook out like a peace offering.

Reggie finally emerges from Julie’s hair and keeps braiding it. 

“I’m sorry,” they read aloud at the same time. 

“Don’t be, okay? We get it. It’s not like you could’ve kissed Julie right then, and I just wasn’t ready. I worried when you didn’t poof back here right away, but it gave us a chance to talk.” 

“Yeah,” Alex cuts in, “I wasn’t here for that talk, and now that you’re back, I feel like I shouldn’t be here for this one. I’m just gonna go before I start making awkward small talk.” 

The three of them wait as he exits the garage. Sure enough, he pops back in a second later. 

“Really quick though, did anyone get a totally different vibe from Nick? Like, before he had a mild, ‘I might be into dudes on the DL’ vibe, but tonight he was exuding ‘I’m gay, what about it, bitch’ vibes, it was weird. No? Okay.” 

With that, he shows himself out, and Julie shakes her head, laughing. 

“I can’t believe he’d think any of us had eyes for Nick earlier, even under the influence of anxiety,” she teases. 

Luke has to hand it to her. Now his throat and his face are on fire. 

“As I was saying,” Reggie continues, hyper-focused on the hair he’s twisting, cheeks coloring prettily again, “we realized that everything is a lot simpler than we’d assumed, and if you’re on board with it, the two of us would like to date you. Please.” 

Julie starts humming as Luke thinks about what to write, and he has to crouch, abandoning his notebook entirely on the floor by her feet. 

_We’re just one dream away from who we’re meant to be_

Careful not to disturb Reggie’s handiwork, Luke tilts her chin up and lets his hand linger there. She meets him the rest of the way, and the lyrics vibrate unspoken between their lips. 

Reggie clears his throat. 

“You should kiss me, too,” he says, voice shaking like he’s trying and failing to be nonchalant, “just so we’re totally clear.” 

Luke parts from Julie and raises his eyebrows. Reggie lifts his hands in answer. 

“All done! I ran out of flowers, though.” 

Without thinking, Luke laughs—and it doesn’t hurt. The three of them gape at one another. 

“Oh my god, it’s like when we got rid of the brands! I wanna do it next, get up here!” Reggie urges. 

He doesn’t need to tell Luke twice. Luke drops a parting kiss on Julie’s forehead before he moves to join Reggie on the couch, placing a hand on the back of his neck to make sure he’s ready, this time. 

This kiss knocks all of the air out of his lungs, the confirmation of a love that’s been building for over twenty-five years.

Maybe it also feels that way because it’s the thing that finishes healing his vocal chords, but he just found the loves of his afterlife, so Luke is allowed to be a total romantic about it. 

_Because we’re standing on the edge of great._


	2. Bonus Scene

Julie’s blood roars through the chasm of her body as she addresses the crowd, and she’s never felt so alive. Her heart—it’d been on fire before, but when Reggie was singing to her, it was like he’d summoned it out, passing from her lips to his, oxygen feeding the flame. 

She hopes that Luke is okay. He’d looked so dazed as his own lyrics flowed over him, unused to being silenced. Julie desperately wants him to know that his passion still blazed through the song, the inferno that started it all. 

An ugly growl of jumbled sound nearly makes her flinch as she finishes tossing out “thank yous,” but she only glimpses the boy’s proximity and Reggie’s shocked face for a split second, and then they’re gone. 

The crowd doesn’t react, so Julie forces herself not to, either. She descends from the stage, waving to Carrie and Flynn. Her best friend’s arms are crossed, and she doesn’t soften even when Carrie smacks a playful kiss to her cheek. 

Carrie shrugs at Julie as if to say, “I tried, sorry.” 

Okay, maybe the flirtatious energy between the three of them had been super obvious. 

Flynn is going to kill her—not only has she managed to fall for one white boy with nice cheekbones, but two of them. Sure, they don’t look like they’re dying of scurvy, but they’re literally dead. Of all the men and women in the world, she picked half of a nineties boy band.

Julie will think of counterarguments later, though. She makes a beeline for her dad, ignoring the laser-like glare piercing the back of her skull and the constant vibrations of her phone. 

Even  _ he _ mentions it, making an offhand comment about “leaving that poor drummer out of their banter, is he not cute enough for you,” on the ride home, which, wow. 

She doesn’t know how much longer she’ll be able to pass the guys off as holograms, and they’ve had many near misses due to random bouts of them becoming corporal. 

Thankfully, Carlos manages to distract their dad by making a big deal about how gross teenagers are—romance and cooties, ew—and he shoots her a thumbs up as she slips away to the studio. 

Reggie has Alex held hostage on the couch, sitting half in Alex’s lap as he braids the longer sections of his hair. The extra weight sort of prevents Alex from jiggling his leg, but not entirely.

“Willie really would’ve been a better candidate for this,” Alex mutters.

“Yeah, but he volunteered to get flowers, and I would’ve felt a lot weirder about having this conversation with him. He would look stunning with a dragon tail braid, though.” 

“From the few times I’ve actually seen him, I have to agree,” Julie chimes in, stepping further into the room. 

Reggie scrambles out of Alex’s lap and off of the couch in a flurry of limbs, nearly elbowing Alex in the face, which earns him a quiet rebuke of “dude” from the drummer.

He rakes a hand through his own hair, still disheveled from earlier, as he turns to face her. 

A whirlwind of emotions churn behind his eyes like they’re demanding to be let out, as if he’ll shatter otherwise. His hands are trembling.

Julie comes over to grasp his arms, rubbing her hands up and down them like she’s seen Luke and Alex do before. 

Alex follows her lead, getting up to place a grounding hand on Reggie’s shoulder. 

“I’m going to find Willie,” he whispers. 

Reggie nods, turning to see Alex. 

“Have him give you the flowers, okay? I’ll make your braids all pretty when you come back, because everyone’s coming back, right?” 

Julie and Alex move forward to sandwich Reggie in a hug, and she nestles her face in the crook of his neck, fingers sinking into the soft material of his signature shirt. 

“Of course I’m coming back, Reg, and so is Luke. I’ll even let you thread the flowers in my hair if you keep your elbows to yourself,” Alex mumbles into the crown of Reggie’s head. 

“I’d let you elbow me in the face for flower braids,” Julie volunteers. 

Their combined efforts coax a watery laugh out of Reggie, and Alex squeezes them both extra tightly before he leaves. 

When the tempest has settled, Julie pulls back just enough to see Reggie’s face, leaving one hand anchored to the back of his flannel. She couldn’t have gone far if she’d wanted to, given that he hasn’t let go of her, either. 

She brings her other hand up to wipe away his stray tears with her thumb.

“What happened?” she prompts.

A hand creeps up into her hair as the story comes tumbling out, fiddling with the curls at the nape of her neck, and she suppresses a shiver.

“Ok, I told Alex some of this already, it’s weird because you were both there but sort of not at different times and I don’t think anyone saw, but Luke—tried to kiss me? I didn’t expect it and it was more like a face punch with a lot of teeth, which—now that I say it out loud, is totally what ‘Crooked Teeth’ is about, but like, in the intentionally rough way. Am I an idiot?”

“Anyway,” he plows on without giving Julie a chance to answer, “we had to poof offstage when our guitars made noise, but he didn’t poof here, and Alex and Willie haven’t seen him. I know he goes off sometimes to clear his head, but I’m worried, I can’t help it.” 

“Is that all?” she asks, knowing that it isn’t as she studies the telling canvas of his skin, where bursts of pink are chasing the green into slivers. He tugs a little harder at her hair. 

“No,” he breathes, “I really like you guys. And I think you like me, too? Which is scary, and kind of a lot, and maybe that’s why Luke left, especially on top of the voice thing—” 

Julie smothers the momentum of Reggie’s concern by capturing his lips. 

They’re softer than they look, pliant and warm as they surge against hers. Playful affection pours between them as he nips at her upper lip, leaving his mouth slightly open so she can retaliate. She runs her tongue over his teeth like she’s soothing the sting of Luke’s rougher attempt. 

She’s so focused on the intensity of the kissing itself that she  _ squeaks _ when a hand sneaks into her back pocket, and she can  _ feel  _ Reggie smirking, the sharp upturn at the corner of his mouth. 

“I’ve decided,” she pants when they finally break apart, “that we are all idiots for not doing that sooner, but Luke is the biggest idiot for not snapping you up as soon as possible, shit.” 

A genuine smile appears on Reggie’s face, and she’s going to have to ask Luke to sing ‘Crooked Teeth’ sometime, because hearing Trevor sing it is going to be  _ weird  _ after today.

“We’re going to talk to him about becoming a thing, right? Once we make sure he’s okay?” 

Julie presses another kiss to his chin to see if his blush deepens. The results are pretty gratifying.

“Yes, Reg. I’d like that. I doubt he’ll say no, but—” 

“We’re both going to be nervous messes until he gets back?” Reggie suggests.

“Maybe. We can’t just make out the whole time, though. I’m sure Alex will want to be here to check on him too, and I want to see these flower braids you keep talking about.” 

She ends up throwing herself into writing part of an essay that isn’t due for several weeks, but Alex does look lovely wreathed in flowers, and then Reggie keeps his hands in her hair, a reverent tether, and Julie knows that this is almost exactly how it’s meant to be.

**Author's Note:**

> I guess this is technically a song-fic? As always, I'd love to know what you all think! :)
> 
> Also, Nautical Mile's cover of [Beautiful Soul](https://open.spotify.com/track/25QFXVIq7aLdHcWgVlzQST?si=XA5kxwcoSu6lG2RNMGH9pg) has been stuck in my head right behind Edge of Great ever since I wrote this, so I might as well share, lol.


End file.
